What is the main message of The People Vs Tech?

The main message of The People Vs Tech is the battle between people and technology, and how it affects our democracy.

How long does it take to read The People Vs Tech?

The reading time for The People Vs Tech varies, but it typically takes several hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is The People Vs Tech a good book? Is it worth reading?

The People Vs Tech is worth reading for its insightful perspective on the impact of technology on our society.

Who is the author of The People Vs Tech?

The author of The People Vs Tech is Jamie Bartlett.

The People Vs Tech Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: The People Vs Tech
Rating: 4.6 (67 reviews)
Author: Jamie Bartlett

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Learn how digital technology is undermining democracy and what we can do about it.

In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of books, movies, and television shows set in dystopian futures. If you’ve ever read or watched one of them, you may have wondered, “How likely is it that the future will be so bleak?” Well, after reading these blinks, you’ll come away with a rather unsettling answer. That is, that it’s very likely – unless we do something about it.

In these blinks, we’ll be looking at some of the ways in which digital technology affects politics and economics. By digital technology, we mean innovations like social media platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data – the collection and analysis of large sets of data. For convenience, we’ll often simply refer to these innovations as “technology,” even though that term usually has a broader meaning.

Technology, in this sense, has brought many undeniable benefits to the world. However, as we’ll see in the following blinks, it also poses equally undeniable dangers to the very underpinnings of democracy – threats that could destroy it unless we acknowledge and address them in time.

In these blinks, you will learn

how encryption and cryptocurrencies pose threats to democratic governments;
how AI may destroy the middle class; and
how governments and citizens can take steps to head off these and many other dangers facing democracy.

Key idea 1 of 9

Democracy requires active, amicable, equal, and free participation from its citizens.

What would happen if a democracy held a national election and no one bothered to debate the issues, inform themselves about policy proposals, or even vote on the candidates? It would be as if you threw a party and no one showed up: hardly a party – or, in this case, a democracy – at all.

Like a party, democracy requires people’s active participation – and the more active the participation, the more robust the result. With democracy, active participation entails sifting through claims, weighing facts, and making decisions on who or what the best candidate or course of action is. Active citizenship is the first of the six pillars on which democracy rests.

Now, let’s say people show up to your party and are actively participating. So far, so good – but what happens if they start getting rowdy? Well, eventually, the party might turn into a riot.

The same goes for democracy. For it to work, citizens must not only actively participate, but do so in particular ways – two of which are to engage in rational debate and to compromise. This shared democratic culture, which enables people to amicably work through their differences and move forward together, is the second pillar.

Now, let’s say you throw a party and a couple of loudmouthed attendees dominate all of the conversations, undermining other people’s abilities to participate in the process. That won’t work either – everyone needs to be able to participate equally and freely. The same goes for democracy. For it to work, citizens must be on a more or less equal footing, be able to talk to each other, and vote on issues and candidates without interference. These attributes comprise the third, fourth, and fifth pillars: equality, free association, and free elections.

Finally, returning to the party analogy one last time – who’s going to look after the gathering to steer people in the right direction and encourage them to participate actively, amicably, equally, and freely? Well, you – the host. Similarly, the government’s job is to ensure that citizens participate in democracy. And to do this job, the government needs power. That’s the sixth pillar: governmental authority.

Unfortunately, modern technology poses a threat to all six of these pillars of democracy. In the following blinks, we’ll see how it’s doing that. Then, we’ll look at what might happen if these pillars collapse, and how this can be avoided.

Key idea 2 of 9

The rise of social media, big data, and artificial intelligence makes citizens less active.

What are the foundations of active citizenship? An easy way of answering this question is to ask why all democracies have a minimum voting age. Well, the answer is simple: children aren’t mature, independent, or wise enough to make political decisions – or so the thinking goes.

At the same time, active citizenship depends on citizens being politically mature, independent-minded, and capable of making their own judgments. Unfortunately, technology weakens all three attributes of active citizenship.

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Key idea 3 of 9

Information overload and social media connectivity encourage tribalism, divisiveness, and demagoguery.

In politics, as in life in general, human beings have a natural tendency to congregate into groups of like-minded individuals. What turns a group into a political tribe is a shared sense of grievances and struggle.

There have always been such tribes, but technology significantly facilitates their creation. By making it easier for people to find and create associations with each other, the internet enables them to cluster into smaller groups with specific grievances, fragmenting the population into more and more tribes. As a result, no matter your background or concern, you’re likely to find your specific tribe online. And, if your tribe doesn’t already exist, you can simply create it.

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Key idea 4 of 9

Technology undermines free and fair elections by enabling political parties to influence voting behavior.

Imagine a science fiction scenario in which an evil genius who’s running for office is able to mind control all the citizens of a democracy. Election day arrives, and – surprise – the evil genius wins in a landslide!

Would this election be free and fair? Of course not – and the reason is simple. To participate in free and fair elections, voters must be able to make up their own minds without undue influence. Unfortunately, technology is making this difficult. While mind control may still be the stuff of science fiction, political parties are gaining an unprecedented ability to influence voters’ decision-making processes by leveraging big data.

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Key idea 5 of 9

AI will decrease the demand for workers, which will increase inequality.

AI has long been a boogie man of science fiction stories and economic doomsayers alike, leading to fears of machines taking over the world – or at least taking over everyone’s jobs.

These fears may be overblown, since they assume a level of AI that’s much more advanced than is likely to develop in the next 50 to 100 years. However, there’s a more realistic fear to have in the meantime: AI will reduce the number of people employed in a large swath of jobs – those involving routine tasks.

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Key idea 6 of 9

Tech companies are uniquely well-positioned to become monopolies with unprecedented degrees of power.

To turn an old saying on its head: as the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. The flipside of AI-powered technology taking over large swaths of the economy, eliminating many jobs, eviscerating the middle class, and increasing inequality is that the companies pushing that technology are also going to become increasingly rich and powerful. Indeed, tech companies have an inherent tendency to become all-powerful monopolies. The very nature of their economic activity paves the way for them to achieve exponential growth that crowds out their competitors.

There are two factors behind this. The first involves a phenomenon called the network effect. Essentially, if you’re a company providing a service that connects people to a network, your service becomes more desirable every time you connect another person to it. This encourages more people to join it, which makes it even more enticing, which leads to even more people joining it, and so on. For example, the more passengers that join Uber, the more drivers it attracts, so that Uber can provide better service – which leads to yet more passengers joining Uber. And so goes the pattern.

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Key idea 7 of 9

Encryption and anonymity allow private actors to evade and thereby undermine governmental authority.

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear the term “democracy?” For many people, it would probably be “freedom.” After all, individual liberty is an undeniably vital component of democracy.

However, an equally vital component is the opposite of freedom: state coercion. To enforce laws that express the will of the people, the government must have a system of coercion in place to be able to do things like make people pay taxes. And to justify and organize this system, the state needs to control information like taxation records.

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Key idea 8 of 9

If the challenges of technology are left unchecked, democracy could descend into dystopia or techno-authoritarianism.

What if humanity doesn’t correct its course from the path it’s currently on, which leads to growing citizen-disengagement, tribalism, electoral manipulation, inequality, monopoly power, and crypto-anarchy? Well, there are two possibilities: a grim future – and an even grimmer future.

Let’s start with the worst-case scenario. This would be an age of dystopian chaos in which governments lose their ability to function. Meanwhile, inequality increases until a tiny group of people ends up with all of the technology, wealth, and power, while everyone else is forced to eke out a livelihood by serving the elite. As disorder grows and society eventually collapses, the rich retreat to their heavily defended compounds, which are already being built by some of today’s tech elites. Peter Thiel, for example, the cofounder of PayPal, recently purchased a 477-acre safe house in New Zealand.

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Key idea 9 of 9

With the right changes, democracy can be updated to withstand and benefit from the advancement of technology.

Once upon a time, ancient Greeks living in small cities were able to practice democracy on a face-to-face level. As society became too large and complex for that to work, representative democracy emerged to carry the torch. This was then kept aloft by the mass party and taxation systems that materialized when industrialism and mass suffrage took center stage.

For some reason, however, democracy stopped evolving at that point. As a result, democracy is no longer in sync with social reality, and it’s unable to keep up with the massive, rapid, technology-driven changes taking place.

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